Jorge Arias Reyes, 51, of Hempstead, pleaded guilty Monday to aggravated vehicular assault and two other charges stemming from a wrong-way drunk driving crash on the Long Island Expressway that left another driver with a fractured tibia and dislocated hip.
Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly announced the plea, entered April 20 in Nassau County court. Reyes faces a sentence of up to five to nine years in prison when he returns to court on June 12.
The facts of the case are not complicated, and they are not close.
On the night of May 18, 2025, Reyes was behind the wheel of a 2009 Honda Odyssey traveling westbound in the eastbound lanes of the LIE near Exit 37 in Roslyn, according to Donnelly. He didn’t drift across the center line for a few yards. He drove the wrong direction for several miles, sideswiping at least one vehicle before slamming head-on into a 2014 Toyota Prius. The driver of that Prius, who is 51 years old, was transported to a hospital with a fractured tibia and a dislocated hip.
Blood drawn from Reyes at the hospital registered a blood alcohol content of .26 percent. The legal limit in New York is .08 percent. Reyes was more than three times over.
Anyone who has driven the LIE through the Roslyn stretch knows how unforgiving that corridor is. Traffic moves fast. Sight lines are decent enough in daylight but compress quickly at night. A vehicle going the wrong way at highway speed isn’t giving anyone much time to react. The fact that the Prius driver survived with the injuries he did, rather than something worse, is fortunate.
The charges Reyes pleaded guilty to were aggravated vehicular assault, assault, and aggravated driving while intoxicated, as reported by Long Island Press. All three carry serious weight under New York law. Aggravated vehicular assault, a class C felony, is what prosecutors reach for when a drunk driver causes serious physical injury. It’s not a reduced charge. It’s not a plea to a misdemeanor with a slap and a warning.
The Nassau County DA’s office has been consistent about pursuing these cases aggressively under Donnelly, who has made impaired driving a stated enforcement priority. That posture matters on Long Island, where car culture and sprawl mean that someone getting behind the wheel drunk isn’t just making a poor personal decision. It’s loading a weapon and pointing it at every other driver on a road designed for speed.
This particular crash didn’t require much investigative complexity. You don’t need accident reconstruction specialists debating skid marks when someone is driving the wrong way for miles on a major highway with a BAC of .26. The evidence built itself.
What the June 12 sentencing will determine is where Reyes lands within that five-to-nine-year range. Judges in Nassau County weigh factors including prior record, degree of cooperation, and the severity of the victim’s injuries. A fractured tibia and dislocated hip are serious. The Prius driver’s recovery timeline and long-term prognosis, if introduced at sentencing, could push the number higher.
Wrong-way crashes on Long Island’s highway system are not rare enough. The New York State Department of Transportation has implemented wrong-way driving detection technology at several highway access points across the state, using sensors and flashing LED signs to alert drivers who enter a ramp in the wrong direction. Whether those systems were in place near Exit 37 in Roslyn at the time of the May 2025 crash is not clear from the record Donnelly’s office released.
What is clear is that the LIE corridor through Nassau County carries tens of thousands of vehicles daily, and that the Prius driver who encountered Reyes that May night was not doing anything wrong. He was going east on an eastbound highway. He got a fractured tibia and a dislocated hip for it.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that drunk driving kills roughly 10,000 Americans per year. New York accounts for hundreds of those fatalities annually. Nassau County prosecutors pursue these cases because the alternative, treating a .26 BAC wrong-way highway crash as a traffic matter, would be an insult to every driver who uses the LIE safely.
Reyes is scheduled back before the court in Nassau County on June 12, where a judge will impose a sentence that could keep him off New York roads for the better part of a decade.